172 book reviews

Marisel C. Moreno Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. xii + 232 pp. (Paper us$27.50)

The title of this book reminded me of one of the most memorable novels I have read, Family Matters by Canadian novelist of Indian descent Rohinton Mistry. The detailed and moving descriptions of the saga of three generations of a middle-class Parsi family from Mumbai confronting all sorts of contemporary challenges and intimate tribulations in a changing society were local, and yet universal. The novel’s narrative voice reinforces this when affirming that “Funny thing is, in the end, … no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different” (2002:197). Up to what degree would the corpus of texts studied by Marisel Moreno depart from or confirm Mistry’s statement? Would this study privilege “family” as a substantive nuclear entity in Puerto Rican society because family matters or would it instead focus mostly on examining the many affairs and happenings within the temporal and physical space of a family unit? Soon we realize that the title refers both to the importance “family” has had and continues to have in informing notions of Puerto Rican identity as well as to the many intimate and social values, beliefs, and experiences within members of Puerto Rican families. In addition, the title functions here as a fundamental overarching structure and trope from which to “capture the need to acknowledge those familial links that unite the ’ communities on the island and in the diaspora” (p. 14). Family Matters offers a provocative critical reading of contemporary Puerto Rican fiction centered on the family, seen as an image of the nation, articu- lated and constructed to promote and then question precisely the foundations of the myth of the great Puerto Rican family. It stands as a thorough, compre- hensive, and compelling examination of the family, the first book-length study to juxtapose narratives by Puerto Rican women writers on the island and in its diaspora. Its publication inscribes itself within a new and refreshing Puerto Rican critical trend that attempts to present both the island and its diaspora as aspects of a single historical process. In doing so, it challenges the primary pillars of a static Puerto Rican identity centered mostly on a Hispanic tradition, the use of the Spanish language, and the island-based location. Family Matters enlarges and revitalizes the scope of most scholarship pub- lished on the topic of u.s. Puerto Rican women’s literature by comparing the Puerto Rican Spanish production to that of other u.s. Latinas or other critical Puerto Rican literary texts. More importantly, the book offers nothing less than a radically alternative reading of what Moreno calls a “transinsular” corpus to

© asela r. laguna, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-08901032 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License. book reviews 173 propose a new theoretical framework from which to examine the experience of the “gran familia puertorriqueña.” This allows her to highlight “the increasingly transnational character of the Puerto Rican population,” forcing the broaden- ing of the Spanish literary canon to include the diaspora. Her comparative approach underscores the links to the home country’s canon, contributes to the visibility of the diasporic writers in their home countries, and diminishes the distance between home country and diaspora populations by contesting what she considers an artificial division between the cultural productions of both sides. She begins (in “Short Introduction”) by recounting the unveiling of the first monument to the Puerto Rican family outside of the island (in Hartford, Connecticut, September 23, 2009) as emblematic of the diasporic ties with the paternalistic and patriarchal familiar past from the island. While it reinforces continuities with the home country traditions, the monument is associated with a long history of political resistance against the colonial power, therefore highlighting simultaneously the conflictive ambivalence of the iconic Puerto Rican family. As Moreno states, “the monument claims not only a symbolic space for Puerto Ricans in the u.s. mainland but also, and equally important, a space signifying that Puerto Ricans are members of a broader family that transcends geopolitical borders” (p. 2). The book has four chapters and an epilogue. Chapter 1 (“The Literary Canon and the Puerto Rican National Culture”) focuses on the literary canon forma- tion in , particularly by those intellectual members of the genera- tion of the 1930s, a founding group of writers who in defining Puerto Ricanness privileged the tenets of hispanismo, patriarchy, the glorification of the past, and a society molded by racial and social harmony, which was uncontested until the 1970s. Equally valuable is Moreno’s archival research on the political and cultural discourses and practices (Serenity Operation) of the Popular Party within the spaces of public and community education to promote the image of a harmonious “gran familia” to curb Americanization while modernizing the country and encouraging migration and the assimilation of those Puerto Ricans who left the island in the post-World War ii period (p. 39). In Chapter 2 (“Our Family, Our Nation: Revisiting la gran familia puertorriqueña”) the interplay between race, gender, class, and power serves to debunk the myth of the harmo- nious family in Rosario Ferré’s Maldito Amor and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s migratory tale, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. Chap- ter 3 (“Retrieving the Past: The ‘Silenced’ Narrate”) provides a new thoughtful look at the role that history, the past, race, gender, and sexuality have played in the texts of Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, and Magali García Ramis and com- pares these narratives with Esmeralda Santiago’s . In

New West Indian Guide 89 (2015) 89–230